


Hardwired

by notyouranswer (gorgeouschaos)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Codependency, Codependent Winchesters (Supernatural), Dark, Episode AU: s05e22 Swan Song, Episode: s05e22 Swan Song, Gen, Hallucination Lucifer (Supernatural) | Hallucifer, Hallucinations, Heavy Angst, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Insanity, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Self-Harm, Soulless Dean Winchester, Soulless Sam Winchester
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-01
Updated: 2019-10-01
Packaged: 2020-11-08 18:10:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20839817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gorgeouschaos/pseuds/notyouranswer
Summary: Dean still pulls up to the cemetery blasting Rock of Ages. He still opens the Cage.The difference is this time he says yes to Michael and jumps into the Cage after Sam.Because taking care of Sammy is hard-wired into his goddamn DNA.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings section:   
Please see tags. Alastair, Michael, and Lucifer show up, and that's why there's a warning for violence. With the self-harm, you have my word I have done my best not to romanticize it, but as it's from the POV of the self-harmer it may be triggering. If you have any questions about triggers or content, please ask, either in the comments or on Tumblr-- my username there is notyouranswers. If I've missed or misrepresented anything important please let me know.
> 
> A/N section:   
I've had this idea for a while and somehow it turned into six pages of angst in two hours last night.   
Uh.  
Oops?   
I mostly just wanted to explore how Dean going into the Cage after Sam would change S6 and S7. This AU may expand if I get inspiration or if anyone is interested but until then I'm marking it as complete.
> 
> I hope you like this fic. If you do, kudos make my day, comments my week. :)

He falls, and falls, and falls. He can feel the archangel inside him screaming and burning and he keeps his brother’s face firmly in his mind to keep from completely losing his mind already.

Dean wonders if Sam’s having the exact same thought.

He remembers hitting the Cage floor.

When he wakes up in the same spot he fell through, he only remembers the fall and the landing. His brother’s right beside him and they stare at the sky and don’t talk.

Sam wonders if Dean forgot everything too. 

Cas answers Dean’s prayers. Sam wonders if the angel would have answered if he had prayed.

“I don’t know who brought you back,” Cas tells them, his eyes tired and his trenchcoat bloody. “I’ll be in touch.”

“Wait. Cas!” Dean barks, and Sam absently appreciates the authority in his brother’s voice because it’s enough to make Cas pause. 

“Yes, Dean?”

“Is it really over?”

Cas’ face softens. “Yes. It seems so.”

Then he’s gone in a rustle of wings.

Sam wonders if Lucifer carved something out of him because he can’t even feel relief as the realization that they stopped the apocalypse sinks in.

“I should feel something, right?” Dean asks, echoing Sam’s thoughts.

“Probably we should, yeah,” Sam responds. He just feels curiosity.

They take the Impala into town, find a bar, and discover they can’t get drunk.

Five days later Dean calls Bobby about a hunt and Sam realizes they hadn’t even remembered to tell him they were alive.

Sam and Dean tear through monsters faster and more ruthless than anyone’s ever seen before. Bobby wonders and worries but keeps his mouth shut, afraid to question a miracle. Castiel is too busy fighting a civil war to wonder if maybe he brought the Winchester brothers back wrong.

The hunters in North America exchange meaningful glances whenever the name Winchester comes up, and if the brothers come near a hunt, everyone else backs off fast.

“There’s something in their eyes,” Rufus tells Bobby five months after Stull. “Something that didn’t use to be there. Something wrong.”

Bobby swallows the rest of his Jack and starts looking for an explanation between calls.

Sam kills a werewolf in human form without hesitating in Des Moines. Dean lets a hostage die to kill a shifter in Minnesota. They put down a nest of vamps in El Paso, a group of ghouls in Louisiana, five demons in a diner in Lincoln. They don’t stop moving, don’t stop hunting. They kill their way across the lower forty-eight and the people in the know start murmuring that maybe they didn’t really come back after all.

Sam prefers prostitutes-- he’s not averse to significantly higher level fraud now so he can afford them-- because they’re easier. Dean still prefers girls he has to sweet-talk, the women in bars looking for a one-night thing they won’t regret. Sam feels nothing when he sleeps with a woman who looks like Jess. Dean feels nothing when he starts chatting up a woman who says her name is Lisa.

Sam and Dean don’t notice.

Sam suggests that they ditch the Impala only once.

“No way.”

“Why not?” Sam asks, cleaning his gun with his eyes locked on Dean.

“I don’t know,” Dean says with a puzzled expression. “It just doesn’t feel right.”

Sam shrugs and doesn’t ask again. 

They run into the Campbells outside of Peoria, Illinois two months after they escape the Cage. They’re watching Laila Vicks’ bones burn when a shoe scuffs gravel a ways behind them. In unison, Sam and Dean draw their guns, flick on their flashlights, and angle their backs together.

“Who’s there?” Sam demands. Before, he and Dean would probably have run to avoid potentially pissing off the cops, but if it’s a cop they can just knock him out. Sam doesn’t need to yell but this hunt was easy and he and Dean are bored.

Samuel Campbell carefully steps forward into the flashlight beams. “Easy, boys. I’m family.”

“No you ain’t,” Dean says. Sam shifts back a little, lets Dean take point. 

“I’m your grandfather,” Samuel protests. “We’re blood.”

“You’re dead, is what you are.”

“I was. Course, so were you, the way I hear it. You and Sam both.”

“We were. Now we ain’t. You got a point?”

“We should work together.”

“I already got a partner,” Dean says, his tone cold. 

“I wasn’t talking to you, boy. Tell me, Sam, you want to hunt with someone who’s as good as you?”

Dean’s finger, still wrapped loosely around his handgun’s trigger, twitches. Sam laughs. 

“Dean’s the best hunter I’ve ever met,” Sam tells Samuel. “I wouldn’t try to mess with us. People who try tend to disappear.”

They leave Samuel standing in the graveyard and start towards Oklahoma. There’s a poltergeist they need to put down.

They get word he and his group got slaughtered by a wendigo in Washington from Bobby a few weeks later.

Sam remembers working well with Dean before the Cage, but over the next year or so, they become the kind of well-oiled machine even John Winchester wouldn’t have dared dream of. They watch each other’s backs with the effortlessness of complete understanding and trust. They know each other so well that they don’t even need to use words anymore.

Sam remembers some of that from before, but it had been hindered by their addictions and buried resentment. Now all they have is clarity and each other and they match like they’ve never spent a minute apart.

More and more monsters show up and Sam and Dean rack up a higher and higher kill count as the months pass.

Bobby bargains with Death. Castiel returns Dean and Sam’s souls.

“You should have left them alone,” Castiel tells Bobby, fury blazing in his eyes. Bobby isn’t sure who it’s directed at. “Their souls feel like they’ve been skinned alive.”

The angel disappears. Bobby remembers Dean’s cold smiles and Sam’s casual violence and he can’t bring himself to regret what he’s done.


	2. Chapter 2

Dean comes to before Sam and refuses to move from Sam’s side, just sits on the edge of Sam’s cot and clutches his brother’s hand until Sam wakes up.

Their walls hold. At first. They go back to hunting with the same easy, fine-tuned awareness and trust that they’d had before (or so people tell them.) Sam drinks a little too much and Dean drinks way too much but the walls hold and it works. They work.

Then Cas breaks their walls.

Dean starts to remember first. He’s done this before, though, he knows the drill-- neat, long cuts down the insides of his already scarred forearms and a healthy amount of booze keep him going. He just has to remember to always keep a jacket on and he can keep up the pretense of sanity.

Sam, though. Dean worries about Sam. Sam doesn’t know how to have his torturer and worst nightmare following him around. (Dean does. Alastair’s been living in his peripheral vision since forty years before Cas burned his handprint into Dean’s arm.)

Sam has Lucifer in his head, Dean has Michael and, on really bad days, Alastair again. But at first Dean thinks they can manage it.

Sam locks himself in the bathroom and breaks the mirror screaming after his third day of no sleep. Dean breaks the door down and patches his brother up. When he can’t convince Sam they’re out he tells him he managed to make another deal and Sam passes out after cursing him for an hour.

_ (Dean gave in and begged the fifty-second time Michael and Lucifer burned Sam from the inside out. He got Sam two years of peace in exchange for his cooperation. Every few decades Dean managed to get Sam a brief respite and Sam tried not to hate Dean for it.) _

Sam tells Dean he may be real but this isn’t and Lucifer is singing Jingle Bells for the forty-sixth time in a row and if they’re not in the Cage anymore they should go back because then at least he would know. Sam yells at empty air and sobs onto Dean’s shoulder and stays up for days before passing out for 18 hours. 

_ (“You never really got off the rack,” Michael whispers in Dean’s ear. Dean tries not to tense in anticipation of the knife and almost manages it. Lucifer watches from where he’s drinking Sam’s blood and laughs as Dean gives in and screams.) _

Dean takes care of Sam and privately congratulates the archangels on the worst thing they’ve ever done to the two of them. Dean takes care of Sam and the cuts across his arms (and then his thighs and ribs) become a tally of every sleepless night and bloody day and waking nightmare.

It works. Dean keeps it together. The muted, angry sting of his cuts keep him grounded, the whiskey keeps him from thinking too hard, and Sam keeps him alive. Dean keeps them both together until they stop by Bobby’s and he offers them separate rooms.

Dean has a full-on flashback, starts screaming at Michael or Alastair or both that he’s not gonna say yes, not gonna hurt Sammy, tries to claw his face off. Sam pins his arms to his sides, drags him into the Impala and blasts Led Zeppelin-- not Def Leppard, not after Stull-- and tells him over and over for hours that he’s not leaving, that they’re out, that it’s over.

Dean doesn’t let himself cry because Michael and Alastair both liked that.

When Dean pulls himself together enough to let Sam take him back inside Bobby doesn’t say anything, just offers Dean a glass of whiskey. Dean accepts it gladly with shaking hands.

Bobby doesn’t comment when Sam and Dean end up curled up together in his too-small guest bed, either, for which Dean will always love him.

Dean makes it work. He and Sam can’t be apart for five minutes and he’s still pretty sure he never left the rack and everyone he’s ever loved is dead except Sam, but he makes it work because he has to take care of his brother.

Because taking care of Sammy is hardwired into his fucking DNA.

Sam tries to shoot an illusion of Lucifer and Dean digs his fingers into Sam’s bandage, feels a sickening blend of satisfaction and guilt as the blood wells up. Sam doesn’t learn how to embrace the pain but embraces the scar instead. Dean thinks he’s glad about that, glad Sam won’t have all the fading and new lines on his body that Dean does.

Bobby gets shot. Sam pushes on his scar hard. Dean punches a sign and gets drunk, Sam drags him back to their room before he can get into a fight, and Dean cuts deep enough into his forearm he has to suture the incision while seeing black spots.

Sam sees the blood and thinks it’s another hallucination.

( _ “I don’t know how much longer I’ll remember who we were,” Sam choked, blood dribbling out of his mouth and onto Dean’s flayed arms. _

_ “Let go, Sammy,” Dean told him, holding Sam’s body tightly to his chest. It’s been 57 years. “Let go. Give in. Forget you were ever sane, ever somewhere else. Just… Just dream. I’ll bring you back when it’s safe. I’ll be here when you wake up.” _

Dean could dream in Hell. He hadn’t been lying when he’d told Alastair dreaming was how he’d lasted thirty years 

He teaches Sam how to dream in the Cage as they die, over and over and over and over. The problem is, it’s easier to learn how to dream than to learn how to stop. The problem is, they can’t remember what it’s like to exist in the real world, to exist without pain.

But together they manage to get through the bad days and the worse ones. Together they keep each other alive and out of the Cage; together they save people and hunt things and carry on the family business. Together they distract strangers and friends from the scars of hellfire in their eyes.

They manage it because all of their dreams involved each other.)

Bobby dies and they spend two weeks hallucinating archangels and bleeding walls and sleeping back to back between grieving the closest thing to a father they’d ever had.

A girl named Chrissy goes into foster care because Dean won’t go with Sam and Sam can’t go without Dean. Meg shows up, saves Dean from a demon, and tells them about a healer named Emanuel who looks exactly like Castiel.

Cas remembers everything after he sees the Word of God and he’s  _ sorry _ ,  _ so  _ goddamn  _ sorry _ , and Dean doesn’t even have the energy to hate him anymore. Dean’s too busy trying to stop seeing Michael’s wings arching from Cas’ shoulders.

Cas offers to rebuild one of their walls. Dean decks him and savors the sting in his knuckles as his fist hits Cas’ face.

“Too fucking late, Cas,” he snarls, and Alastair laughs, and beside Dean Sam’s watching Lucifer make a balloon animal out of Meg’s intestines. 

Sam won’t leave Dean alone and Dean doesn’t know how to leave Sam behind. They keep dragging each other back up to the surface with the ease of a century of practice.

They make their plan to invade SucroCorp and alter it to keep Sam and Dean together. When Cas suggests otherwise, Dean’s hand grabs onto Sam’s shoulder hard enough that Sam doesn’t even have to push on his scar to make Lucifer flicker and disappear.

“Sam and I stay together.”

Cas looks at the two of them, really looks, and Dean almost feels bad at the guilt in his eyes. 

He probably would if Cas hadn’t done this to them in the first place. It’s Cas’ fault he and Sam can’t tell what’s real, it’s Cas’ fault not being in agony is its own form of torture.

The angel doesn’t argue.

When Dean and Cas get dragged into Purgatory, Sam is right beside them.

In the grey, dim forests of Purgatory, even Lucifer fades.

When the four of them get out, Dean realizes he hasn’t taken a blade to his own skin or taken a drink in a year and Sam doesn’t press the scar on his hand anymore.

When they get out, Dean still sees Alastair and Michael everywhere, still wakes up feeling their sigils etched into his skin. Sam still has Lucifer screaming in his ear, still sees the walls of the Cage behind his eyelids when he blinks.

Dean doesn’t know if they’ll ever be okay again, ever be  _ sane  _ again. But it’s his job to take care of Sam. It’s in his genetic coding to watch out for Sammy, just like it’s in Sam’s to watch Dean’s back. 

Dean has Sam, and Sam has him.

Most days they’re pretty sure that’s true.


End file.
